Apple's latest installment of the iMovie family left many dissatisfied as the ability to downgrade to iMovie HD from iLife 09 was dropped.

I have my own fair share of rants about Windows computers, but I notice that I do tend to have more positive comments to the Mac I have. Well it wasn’t until this weekend, when I actually opened up iMovie ‘09 for the first time, that I realized the one major flaw it has. I have never used any previous versions of iMovie, but I did hear that when Apple “completely redesigned” iMovie ‘08, it was so different that Apple actually let users downgrade for free. For me, I hoped that the 2009 version would have fixed what was wrong, because they did drop there support for free downgrading with iLife ‘09.

Well, it was a good 4 hours later when I had finally finished my first very important video. The program had run smooth and steady the whole time, even with constant video adding, editing, etc. But when I started it from the top to quickly review my production without rendering it, iMovie decided to “unexpectedly quit”. And it wasn’t until I reopened the program that I learned that iMovie ’09s claimed Auto-Save is all but real. Don’t get me wrong, the video clips I have imported were there, but the hours upon hours of work putting them together meticulously was not there.

In my conclusion, I’ll let you know in the process of creating over 5 short-films, iMovie crashed a total of 12 times for me, all for unexpected reasons. So I just have to ask Apple why. Being honest, the program and its abilities are just shy of professional video editing software, but the fact that I cannot manually go to: File > Save, to keep my progress every now and then is flat out ridiculous. If there’s one thing that needs to be in iMovie ‘10, it better be the ability to save, cause it sure isn’t there.

I’ve yet to discover a work-around even after reading elsewhere that you can manually save the file via drag and drop through the finder, but that is not the case. I’ll let you know if I ever figure this out. Leave a comment if you think you’ve figured out how to fix this, cause I know I’m not the only one!